YOU. YOU WHO LIGHT OUR TORCHES.

“The people who light our torches to help us see better, who transmit our discoveries from one consciousness to another, are what we call artists.

Artists are also the ones who help reconcile us to the fragility that comes with our creaturely nature and strews our search with so much suffering.

Suffering — biological and psychological, in private and en masse — has always accompanied our species, as it has every species.

But we alone have coped by transmuting our suffering into beauty, by making symphonies and paintings and poems out of our fragility — beauty that does not justify the suffering, but does make it more bearable, does help the sufferers next to us and after us, in space and in time, suffer less, in ways the originating consciousness can never quantify in the receiving, never estimate their reach across the sweep of centuries and sufferings.”

I don’t care how others define you and what you do.

I don’t really care if you think I’m speaking idiocy.

You do have the power to ease psychological suffering within you, even if you can’t help the biological suffering around us all.

What would you say if you were speaking to your father, desperately ill in a hospital, knowing he will probably die?

What would you say to your spouse as s/he grieves a loss that has come all too soon?

What would you say to your child, frightened, uncertain, to calm her and give her hope?

What would you say to the doctors and nurses and care-givers risking their health, their lives, for you and your family?

What would you say if your husband or child just lost their job with no prospect of a new one until this disease is finished with us? How would you help?

Say that.

Say exactly that.

Do you have the gift of humor? Can you say something that breaks this unbearable mood?

Do it.

Do that.

Use the gifts you’ve been given. Be the artist you’ve always known is deep within.

Be the difference to someone listening to you today.